That $9 per month (up from $8 recently)—paid by 50 million subscribers!—pays for some of the most impressive engineering efforts on the 'net. It is not some cheap slacker service, it's best in class. Considering their global distribution, it would be absolutely shocking if they do not have full 24/7 coverage.

But he got a 'half way to universal healthcare measure' through congress

No, he didn't. Since ACA, uninsured rates have dropped ~25%.

where a universal healthcare measure would not get through

There's a lot to unpack in this bit of wisdom. First of all, there were other alternatives. Second, they weren't considered. It had been over a decade since a serious universal coverage proposal was discussed, and it was just discarded without discussion.

Putting that aside, a majority of Americans support a single-payer system. The fact that Congress can't "get through" policies with "wide support" is a clear sign that Congress is corrupt and insulated from accountability. While that's a political reality to contend with, it's also a self-reinforcing psychological barrier.

Keep in mind that there are policies which have broad popular support and political support and still "can't get through", such as campaign finance reform. There is near unanimous support, and yet... Amusingly, unfucking campaign finance would almost certainly go a long way toward opening doors for other sweeping changes that have broad support.

With luck the next administration will get though the 'single payer' option

I sincerely doubt this. ACA took all the political capital for healthcare reform for the next decade or two.

I'll take an pragmatic incrementer over someone calling for a revolution that will never happen.

You have to define "revolution" here. I know Sanders has been using the term, so it's kind of colored by recent events, but there is nothing revolutionary about instituting policies which are mainstream and successful in huge swaths of the world with a variety of economic, social and political conditions.

Among other more complicated things, the principle that anyone should be able to determine for themselves what they experience, and how they'd prefer to be treated by others. Unless you are a target of a set of epithets, you are not entitled to determine how people who are targets are expected to feel.

Keep in mind that "can do" or "allowed" are social preferences, not law. Violating those preferences makes you an asshole, not a criminal (and conversely, choosing to honor those expectations even if they aren't your own is empathy). So if you're comfortable being an asshole, by all means interject yourself into how others feel about their treatment which has nothing to do with you.

So are Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. Socialism is fundamentally rooted in capitalism, and Marx was not shy about this. It's actually an embarrassment for the left. The US might do better with socialism because conditions are significantly different from the countries you named. But socialism is a band aid at best, and proven to be problematic at worst.

The US would frankly do better burning its institutions down than not. It's hardly fair to pick on socialism in that context.

Salt Lake City, liberal for Utah but not exactly a leftist utopia, proved a solution that nearly ended chronic homelessness in their city. The solution is simple and cost-effective, when compared with basically every other city's approach: give homeless people homes. While chronic homelessness is basically a fact of life in major urban areas, SLC saw reductions of 91%. And they did it with lower costs than any other program.

The sad fact for Seattle is that we actually pioneered the program, as Housing First, before we abandoned it for programs that are far more expensive and far less effective. It was a small pilot program, but in its scope saw similar success. But Seattle, despite having a fairly left-leaning population, is not administered with the same leanings. One of the tent cities you mention was specifically named after mayor Greg Nickels whose policies on homelessness were to undermine programs designed (albeit poorly) to help, and to send cops out to slash up people's tents and confiscate property of the inhabitants. He explicitly called for shipping homeless people *out* of the city, hardly a sanctuary.

Like you, Nickels complained of "handouts". As if taking the only remaining resources away from people will promote their success. The effect is predictable: people who have nothing left to depend on find alternatives. This is the "criminal/drug activity" you speak of. You can't expect people with the fewest resources in society to thrive as you kneecap them. And you can't make them go away.

What you can do is do the fiscally conservative thing: choose a solution that works, costs the least of all existing programs, and eliminates huge swaths of bureaucracy and corruption. Give homeless people houses.

By the way, Sawant is hardly representative of the city council. The fact that you have trouble distinguishing her from the rest of the city leadership, despite distinguishing her from Sanders, shows how little you understand about how this city operates.